CAA football's northern conundrum

By Dave Fairbank

Maine and New Hampshire illustrate the Colonial Athletic Association membership conundrum – a pair of valued, successful, football-only outposts to which the league wants, and is practically obligated, to address.

Departures and shutdowns leave Maine and UNH as the only remaining members playing football at this level from the old Yankee Conference after the 2012 season. The league expanded southward, the northern tier shrank, and now the CAA needs schools — not only for football, but for all sports.

CAA expansion is a little like three-dimensional chess because of all the different components: all-sport membership; football only; geography; academic fit; level of competitiveness.

Would various northern schools be willing to join for football only? Or would they hold out for full membership? If the CAA is forced to look south to fill its football league, might Maine and UNH have to consider other alternatives because of the increasing cost of travel and doing business? If a couple northern schools come on board for football, might Rhode Island re-think its impending departure to the Northeast Conference?

“Are we an ideal geographic fit for the league? Probably not,” Maine coach Jack Cosgrove said this week at CAA preseason media day. “Quite frankly, we need the league more than the league needs us. Because we have nowhere else to go.”

Maine is the extreme outlier, its campus closer to Halifax, Nova Scotia (251 miles) than to any CAA football rival except New Hampshire (210 highway miles). A few comparative driving distances: Orono, Me., to Villanova, Pa. (568 miles); to Towson (656 miles); to Richmond (801 miles); to Harrisonburg (820 miles).

Last season, the Black Bears spent nearly $400,000 to charter planes to away games, an immense figure for an FCS program. They were 5-2 in road games to which they chartered, losing to FBS Pittsburgh and to Georgia Southern in the FCS playoffs.

“When we look at factors for our success through the years, the No. 1 factor is how we travel,” Cosgrove said. “We’ve had some nightmares traveling, and if we can get places with minimal headaches, that gives us a much better chance of competing at our best on Saturdays.”

Cosgrove does much of the fund-raising for travel himself, joking that, “I’m probably the best fund-raiser at my job in the country.”

Now, Nick Saban likely could walk along Alabama interstates wearing a sandwich board that reads “We need money” and have people bury him in C notes, but he doesn’t have to, and Cosgrove’s point is well taken. Cosgrove also credited a core group of boosters, fans and alumni as dedicated to football and extremely generous.

“A challenge for us, but it’s one that we’ve embraced,” Cosgrove said. “We know it’s there. We’re going to meet that to be a part of this league, because it’s a great league. It raises standards, it raises aspirations for our student-athletes, everybody in our program. It’s a challenge, but we have nowhere else to go.”

Not so long ago, the CAA had distinct northern and southern groupings: New Hampshire, Maine, UMass, Hofstra, Rhode Island and Northeastern in the north; William and Mary, James Madison, Richmond, Delaware, Villanova and Towson in the south.

But Hofstra and Northeastern shuttered their programs. UMass, like Connecticut in the late 1990s, went the Division I-A, or FBS, route. Rhode Island decided to lower costs and announced its program would head for the Northeast Conference, an FCS league in which not all programs do the 63-scholarship, max-facilities thing.

“We’ve all got to take a step back and re-evaluate what part geography should play,” UNH coach Sean McDonnell said. “Look at the national scene right now. Look at the ACC, look at the Big East, look at where some of these schools are traveling to play games. … The landscape of college football has changed and it’s trickled down from Division I (BCS leagues.) We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

New Hampshire has made eight consecutive trips to the FCS playoffs, the longest current streak in the division and a truly remarkable feat, given its location, recruiting base and level of competition in the CAA. Maine has made four trips to the playoffs in the past 11 years, and in 2011 was the CAA team that advanced furthest.

“It would pain me to reduce the quality of the product that we have at Maine right now,” Cosgrove said. “We were the last team standing from this conference in the playoffs. To reduce, to go backwards is not something that I would promote or even want to be close to associated with.”

Yes, basketball is the CAA’s calling card and should be its No. 1 priority in the present round of expansion. But it’s incumbent upon commish Tom Yeager to do everything possible to meet the remaining northern football members halfway. Given their locations, more than halfway.